ITWeb is running a survey on securing the enterprise in a multi-cloud environment.

The objective of the survey, sponsored by Veritas, is to explore the cyber security gaps in standard backup and disaster recovery offerings that cloud service providers (CSPs) offer.

Neil Thorns, Veritas’ regional director for South Africa, says, “Enterprises still use these solutions, even for mission critical workloads and data in the cloud, likely because they’re easy to implement as an add-on service through the CSP and seem cost-effective at the outset.

“Moreover, in a multi-cloud environment, add-on backup and recovery services vary in feature sets depending on each CSP, rather than having a unified set of features and tools across each CSP.”

He says enterprises tend to rely on the default settings when using these tools, rather than configuring them to their organisation’s unique backup and disaster recovery requirements. "In most cases, these settings do not provide adequate air cover and instead widen the vulnerability gap.”

As enterprises move more of their workloads and business services into public cloud services, while accelerating the containerisation of their applications, they may experience a false sense of security.

Thorns explains: “They’re relying on the standard, add-on services for data security, backup and recovery, rather than implementing a third-party backup and recovery tool.”

The latter can offer features like cross-cloud visibility and observability to all data and applications, as well as continuous data protection, ransomware resilience, immutable storage and reliable disaster recovery for their cloud and containerized workloads and data.

While CSP tools offer a basic level of backup, data protection and disaster recovery, we live in a world where ransomware has evolved into a sophisticated form of organised crime. Large enterprises are an inviting target for cyber criminals, especially as their attack surface expands with more endpoints, networks, servers, mobile devices and, most importantly, more cloud-based and containerized workloads.

In this survey, we examine, among other things:

1. To what extent does your organisation use native cloud security tools when accessing/storing data in cloud environments?

2. What level of visibility does your organisation have on data stored within cloud environments?

3. Does your organisation have a recovery plan in place in the event of its data being compromised/lost?

We hope you’ll be able set aside a few minutes of your time to participate in the survey, and stand a chance to win a Mastercard voucher to the value of R5 000. The detailed results of the survey, and the prize winner, will be published on ITWeb.

To play your role in compiling this cyber security trends report, please complete the survey.

Survey probes cyber security gaps in the public cloud